HANDS ON GUIDE

RDRAM

Does the R stand for rubbish?

Back in the late 1990s, RAMBUS's RDRAM was widely seen as the future of memory technology. The high-end PC133 SDRAM of the time was limited to a bandwidth of 1066MB/sec; RDRAM could take us to 2400MB/sec and beyond. Intel liked those numbers enough to decide that RDRAM was the perfect partner for future generations of Pentium processor. In 1996, Intel struck a deal with RAMBUS, making RDRAM the performance memory technology for Pentium III and the only memory technology for Pentium 4. However, this proved to be problematic.

The first problem was that cheap PC133 SDRAM was already available and RDRAM was comparatively expensive. The second difficulty was the royalties demanded by RAMBUS for every memory stick sold, but the clincher was when Intel's own testing proved that high-latency RDRAM performed slower than PC133 on the Pentium III.

Suffice to say RDRAM became a technological dead end, as the industry standardised behind cheap and cheerful DDR, which offered the same bandwidth at lower latencies. In 2002, embarrassed by the success of VIA's DDR Pentium 4 chipsets, Intel renegotiated the deal with RAMBUS and released the i845 chipset, effectively making DDR the official Pentium 4 platform overnight. Arguments still rage over RDRAM - did the major memory manufacturers bomb the price of DDR in order to make it look less attractive? At least Intel realised its mistake. 'We made a big bet on RAMBUS and it didn't work out,' Intel's then CEO, Craig Barrett, told the 'Financial Times' in 2002.

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